The best of our people to watch in past years

We pick 11 standouts among those featured in our annual people to watch features

Jessica Yee, photographed on May 28, 2010,
was featured among our people to watch in 2010. She seems destined to continue doing important work as an activist.

By:OAKLAND ROSSFEATURE WRITER, Published on Fri Dec 31 2010

They are Canadians to be proud of — citizens of the true north who are making signal differences to the lives of others, in their city and country, and around the world.

They come from all sorts of professional backgrounds — the arts, social activism, fashion, sports, medicine and more.

The common denominator among them is simply this: one way or another, they have not only met but exceeded the lofty personal and professional goals they themselves have set, contributing in myriad ways to strengthening and enlivening the social fabric that unites us all.

Each year for the past eight years, the Star has selected a group of 10 outstanding citizens, people of extraordinary accomplishment who were poised to make an even bigger impression and an even greater difference in the near future.

And so they have.

Now, from that impressive cast, the Star presents a decagon (plus one) of truly distinguished Canadians — men and women to be proud of, grateful to and thankful for.

Joseph Boyden (Featured in 10 to Watch on Jan. 1, 2005)

His first novel, Three Day Road, earned high international praise, with sales to match.

His follow-up opus, Through Black Spruce, won the Giller Prize.

He has recently published a work of non-fiction, a popular study of Canadian Métis leaders Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont.

Now he is at work on two new fiction projects — “actually to see which one takes over.”

Joseph Boyden, it may safely be said, is not a man for keeping still.

Raised in Toronto, Boyden now spends much of the year in Louisiana, where he and his wife, Amanda, are both writers-in-residence at the University of New Orleans and where they share a century-old home, a former store that last did service as a Cuban corner grocery.

“It’s a space we really love and have poured our hearts into,” says Boyden, now 44.

In addition to writing and teaching, Boyden serves as an environmental custodian. He’s a member of the Waterkeeper Alliance, an organization founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with the goal of preserving natural waterways. Boyden is president of the Moose Riverkeeper, which aims to protect the Moose River in northern Ontario.

That might seem a long way from Basin St., but it isn’t, really.

“I can be home in Toronto in 21/2 hours,” says Boyden. “My Canadian connections are very strong.”

Marianne McKenna (Jan. 1, 2004)

Who’s afraid of Rob Ford?

Not Marianne McKenna. She believes the newly minted mayor of Canada’s largest city — a man better known as a penny-pincher than a social visionary — could become a force for good, not because she likes his policies, but because she doesn’t.

“Contrary notions sometimes challenge you to think harder about what you’re saying,” she says.

As for the future of Canada’s cities: “I’m very optimistic about it.”

McKenna, 60, is the “M” in Toronto architectural firm KPMB, and she’s responsible for some of the most compelling new designs in Toronto, Montreal and beyond, including the Telus Centre, that airy marriage of tradition and modernity that now houses the Royal Conservatory of Music on Bloor St. W.

In Montreal, she was instrumental in the creation of the newly opened Concordia University complex overlooking Rue Guy. McKenna, recently named one of Canada’s 100 most powerful women in 2010, is now in charge of a project to build a quantum-nanotechnology centre at the University of Waterloo.

“I’m most involved in cultural, academic, community-based work,” she says, “work that stimulates a community to think about itself.”

Does that process include the mayor?

In McKenna’s view, it does.

“Bring on Rob Ford,” she says. “Let’s talk to him.”

Nicole Winstanley (Jan. 1, 2006)

“It’s been crazy.”

Nicole Winstanley is describing her life over the past six months or so, ever since she gave birth to her first child, a son named Noah, who thought it would be amusing if he made his appearance fully two months earlier than scheduled.

That kind of thing does tend to register on the craziness scale.

But Winstanley, recently installed as publisher of Penguin Books Canada, seems to be taking it all in stride.

She is on maternity leave now, but she still ventures into the office for meetings now and again, does some editing work at home, and plots the future of one of Canada’s most prominent publishing houses.

She joined Penguin in 2006, charged with responsibility for strengthening its fiction list, which was then languishing. Among her first projects was Three Day Road, a new book by a new Canadian writer named Joseph Boyden (see elsewhere in this list) that she had sold when she was the literary agent representing Boyden. That worked out well.

Last January, Winstanley, now 37, took over as Penguin’s publisher. Her plans for the months and years ahead include building up the company’s lists of commercial fiction and non-fiction titles as well as producing more books for young readers.

Doomsayers declaim darkly upon the future of book publishing, but Winstanley thinks they’re wrong.

“The short answer is I’m bullish,” she says, insisting she’s not afraid of the current profusion of digital alternatives to conventional books, from laptop computers to Kindles and iPads.

“I think we’re lucky to have as many outlets as possible to bring great works of literature to people,” she says. “I feel there will always be a demand for stories.”

Peter Zandstra (Jan. 3, 2010)

One day, Peter Zandstra might just save your life.

He probably won’t be doing it in person, though. After all, he’s much too busy at the lab — in this case the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research at the University of Toronto — where he’s conducting cutting-edge research on stem cells.

It’s the stem cells, more directly, that may soon be saving lives thanks to their extraordinary ability to grow and develop into other kinds of cells, the launch pad for all sorts of human tissue.

“I think, for the field, it’s a phenomenally exciting time,” says Zandstra, 42. “Technologies are moving forward. You’re starting for the first time to see delivery on a lot of this promise.”

Zandstra and his colleagues are exploring the nature of stem cell reproduction and the means stems cells use to communicate with one another. So far, the work seems to be going well.

“Our role has been to figure out how to produce cells,” he says. “We’re now learning how to grow large numbers of cells.”

With stem-cell technology, it might eventually be possible to produce various kinds of human tissue in the laboratory, material that could then be transplanted into ailing patients. At least, that’s one possibility.

But Zandstra doesn’t see the future in quite this light.

“I don’t think that’s the way it’s going to go,” he says. “I think we’ll learn how to develop drugs or biological material to get cells in bodies to regenerate in situ. I think that’s what it’s all about — rejuvenation.”

Or, to put it another way: one day, Peter Zandstra might just save your life.

Chilina Kennedy (Jan. 4, 2009)

The day Chilina Kennedy stops singing will be the day Niagara Falls runs out of water.

It might happen someday, but it won’t happen soon.

Last summer, the New Brunswick-born force of nature played Eva Peron in the Stratford production of Evita, which might seem like a full-time job — but not for Kennedy. She also starred as Maria in West Side Story.

Last month, Kennedy opened at Toronto’s Canon Theatre, playing Philia in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which runs through Jan. 16.

Next summer, she’ll take on the role of Mary Magdalene in Jesus Christ Superstar at Stratford.

Oh — and she’ll also be playing Rose of Sharon in The Grapes of Wrath, another Stratford production.

Still just 32, Kennedy says she revels in the sheer variety of roles she’s been selected to perform, from the winsomely sensual Maria to the austere and driven Evita and now the somewhat addle-brained Philia.

“She’s a brick short of a full load,” Kennedy says of the Roman courtesan, the character she’s currently playing at the Cannon. “The joy for me is the variation and differences in the parts.”

Kennedy’s life may sound frenetic, and it probably is, but she’s trying to impose some domestic stability, too. For example, she recently bought a home in Stratford.

“It’s got a great community,” she says. “I think it’s such a great place to raise kids.”

Not that she has any.

“I’m single,” says the singer. “But I have two dogs.”

Janice Price (Dec. 31, 2006)

Ten days. One city. The world.

It was a challenge from the word go. But a mere four years after its founding, the Luminato festival has firmly established itself on Toronto’s cultural landscape, and Janice Price is eager to spread the praise.

“This city was ready for an annual large international arts festival,” says Luminato’s CEO. “I give a lot of credit to the audience.”

Still, in less capable or determined hands, the 10-day-long celebration of local, national and international arts and artistry could easily have gone awry, for it is no easy task to craft a tradition on the run.

“You don’t have the luxury of building events and brands nowadays,” says Price, 54. “You really have to come out and make your mark and move very aggressively forward.”

Held each June, the Luminato festival provides a kind of two-way mirror, projecting Canadian artists to the world while bringing international performers to Toronto.

“It was extraordinarily difficult,” says Price. “It was a lot of work. But I’ve been enormously gratified and surprised at how quickly the Luminato idea has entrenched itself locally and globally.”

That doesn’t happen all by itself, of course — which is why we need people like Janice Price.

Kirk Pickersgill and Stephen Wong (Dec. 30, 2007)

If you want to be successful, it helps to have a strategy — unless, of course, you happen to be Kirk Pickersgill or Stephen Wong.

In that case, the best advice is to stick with a winning game.

It seems to work for them.

“Stephen and I don’t have a plan,” says Pickersgill. “Every day is new for us.”

Wong, agrees. “Things happen organically here.”

Here is the Toronto studio where the two fashion designers concoct their clothing line for women, known as Greta Constantine, and a newer venture into men’s fashion, known as Ezra Constantine.

“When we set out, our goal was just to put it out there,” says Wong, “to see if anyone shared the same vision.”

Now with a showroom in Milan and a growing national and international profile, Pickersgill, 43, and Wong, 41, are thinking of expanding their joint design vision into fashion accessories and house ware — organically, of course.

“This is still new to Kirk and me,” says Wong, “and we’re still learning.”

Jessica Yee (Jan. 3, 2010)

Youth activist Jessica Yee seems fated to be an activist forever, but what about her age?

“In the future,” says Yee, now 25, “I’m not going to be a youth anymore.”

As a result, the founder and executive director of the Native Youth Sexual Health Network seems certain to begin changing her life’s focus before very long.

In fact, she sees it as an obligation.

The groundbreaking agency is run and staffed exclusively by natives under the age of 25, who interact with their peers on a wide range of sex-related issues, including homophobia, domestic violence, sex workers’ rights and healthy sexuality.

“We want to remain peer run,” says Yee, who launched the organization five years ago. “I think it’s important for me to practise what I preach.”

She won’t be moving out, however. Instead, she’ll be moving on.

The daughter of a Mohawk mother and a Chinese father, Yee plans to take up midwifery, not only as a profession but also as a cause.

She hopes to restore the traditional role of midwives in native society, women who delivered babies — yes — but also, and critically, served as mentors for youth.

As for the youth services agency she helped establish at age 20 — “in my basement in Toronto with three people” — Yee is confident it will remain in good hands.

“Our staff are just so amazing,” she says. “They’re the bread and butter of our community.”

Shary Boyle (Dec. 31, 2006)

Perhaps typically, Shary Boyle is doing two things at once.

She’s helping to install an ambitious show of her work at an art gallery in Montreal, and at the same time she is dreaming about the Arctic.

The Montreal exhibition, called Flesh and Blood, is the same show that occupied four rooms at the Art Gallery of Ontario this past fall and was hailed in this newspaper and elsewhere.

Boyle’s fascination with the North is a separate case.

“I’m in the planning stages of realizing a long-held dream of travel to Cape Dorset, Nunavut,” she explains in an email exchange.

That trip is scheduled for March. While in the North, Boyle plans to work with “the incredible artists of the Kinngait Studios” — a five-decade-old printmaking centre on Baffin Island.

Last year’s winner of the AGO’s Gershon Iskowitz prize — along with its stipend of $25,000 — Boyle, 38, is earning international acclaim and some controversy for her drawings, sculptures and paintings.

She is perhaps best known for a series of fanciful and often troubling porcelain figurines that are part kitsch, part Hieronymus Bosch — Zellers meets The Twilight Zone.

“I hope my art gives permission for people to think uncommonly and be thrilled,” she said, “to feel less alone . . . to feel the secret power of silent imagination.”

Steven Stamkos (Dec. 30, 2007)

He’s just 20 years old, he’s in only his third NHL season, and he’s probably the best offensive player in the league (if you don’t count a guy named Sidney Crosby).

Not bad for a kid who once seemed too scrawny for the big time.

“A lot has to do with being confident,” says Steven Stamkos, the Markham native who now plays centre for the Tampa Bay Lightning. “As you start to play more, you realize you have that extra second to make a play.”

That realization took hold for Stamkos in his second NHL season, when he scored 51 goals, a higher figure than his combined output of goals and assists the previous year.

“I realized I could play against really good players,” he says. “The jump to the NHL is a lot bigger than some people think.”

Nowadays, Stamkos is a scoring threat every time he hits the ice.

All that, and he’s a nice guy, too, thoughtful, articulate and courteous.

“A lot has to do with the people who surround you,” he says. “For me, personally, I was brought up in a respectful way.”

He also credits veterans Mark Recchi and Gary Roberts, who served as his role models when he entered the big league.

As for the high expectations that inevitably accompany improved play, Stamkos says that kind of pressure simply goes with the game.

“You go out every night and try to do your job. I put the most pressure on myself.”

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